The Lovely Beads

There are little piles of beads on the floor of I. Ronni Kappos bedroom. They are fastidiously segregated, by size and color and shape, into grids in clear plastic trays, like a mathematicians game of infinite ticktacktoe. I wake up every morning and feel love for these beads, she says. I love their smooth superflatness, their vibrant color. A tight phalanx of necklaces in progress is laid out on her desk. I love these tablet-sized beads. I love these little Chiclet beads. She caresses a small, flat bead that looks like a pink Tylenol. Six years ago, Kappos was an art-history student stringing necklaces as a hobby. But eventually the beads took over. Friends, friends of friends (and now the cast of Friends) loved her work so much that shes recently quit her day job to go into jewelry making full time.

In person, Kappos is an angular slip of a girl in jeans and flip-flops, both silly and intense. When she was a kid, she says, she and her identical-twin sister used to pretend to be squirrels. Thats cute, you think, and strange. But then it fits.

Necklaces are the core of her collection, and they are deceptively simple. Theyre sweet. Elegant. Minimal. A little like Tetris, a lot like DNA. Beads are arranged into larger configurations  nine multicolored diamond beads into one big diamond, or a dozen baby capsules into one big capsule  all knotted together onto a single, impossibly thin strand of silk. Theres something to having these complicated structures with one string running through, holding it all together, she says, gently nudging a wayward Chiclet 2 millimeters back into alignment. She is, when it comes down to it, a skilled craftsman, an artist-engineer on the micro scale. Each piece is a little engineering feat. Each bead is double- or triple-drilled, so you can build interesting shapes. Its almost like constructing a building, or solving a puzzle. Her pieces are a graphic designers dream. Partly its her retro yet modern color palette  cherry reds, pinks, bright peacock and cerulean blues, milky whites and deep, earthy browns skimming a thin hairline of red or chocolate. And partly its her pared-down sense of geometry. With beaded jewelry, its all about arrangement. Kappos bead structures are as thoughtful as those marking out prayers on a rosary.

Her necklaces are evocative: One looks like a lollipop. Another looks like a toy model of the solar system  for that one she envisioned bright spots of color hovering around a womans collarbone. And they all look like luscious, just-licked candy  mint lozenges, red-hots, Good & Plenty, licorice, pastilles. She has unofficial names for many of her designs, like the Sandwich necklace or the Molecule series. Last season, she made a line (Ties and Collars) inspired by Girl Scout collars and mens neckties that seemed to abstract the essence of each of those items into two-dimensional flat blocks of color. Theyre serious yet playful. Did she say squirrel?

But wait, dig even deeper: The beads themselves have history. Kappos first fell for them at a local bead store, then tracked them down to a source in Germany. The same girl wholl sit for hours pushing tiny beads around on a table also has a scholars tenacity. These beads are dead-stock vintage glass from the 1920s and 30s. The company that originally manufactured them shut down shortly after World War II. They opened up this factory and discovered huge crates of beads. Each time they open up a new crate, they never know whats going to be inside. Sometimes you have a true favorite and then . . . its gone. Modern beads dont do it for her. They have seams around the edges. The colors arent as vibrant. But the limited supply raises the question: Does she ever worry about the beads running out? People ask me that all the time, she sighs ever so slightly, but if they did run out, I would just move on to something else. It took me a while to realize it, but its not just the beads. Theres also me.